Well, I think it's fair to say that the China strategy worked out for them, because just a few weeks ago as I pen these words they were reporting growth and good numbers on the old balance sheet.

So I was completely blown away when I heard the news that CEO and founder Nick Martin has been squeezed out – it seems the board and Nick had different views about the future of the company.

I personally think this is very, very sad. This company was Nick's baby. Way back in the early 1980s, Nick was living "Down Under" on the island of Tasmania. Nick required access to tools to design printed circuit boards, but such tools were jolly expensive at the time, so he designed his own. In 1985, Nick formed Protel, which subsequently became one of the major players in affordable, off-the-shelf PCB design tools.

In 2001 they adopted the name Altium and began to branch out into other areas, starting with PCB-FPGA co-design, and now all sorts of stuff like Cloud-based computing.

The "official" release from Altium is presented below. I'm sure the new CEO will be great. I'm sure Altium will do well in the future. But for myself, I am "as sick as a parrot" (as they say in England) with regard to the way Altium has treated Nick. It's their loss. I wish Nick all the very best for the future, and hope to see him again one day when we can quaff a few beers and talk more about Doctor Who (we both watched as kids from behind the sofas in our respective parent's houses).

---------- The Official Release Follows ----------

ALTIUM ANNOUNCES CEO DEPARTURE AND APPOINTMENT OF CEO

Sydney, Australia - 15 October 2012 - Electronics design software company Altium Limited (ASX:ALU) advises that Chief Executive Officer and Founder Mr Nick Martin has stepped down from his positions with the company with immediate effect and is replaced by Executive Vice Chairman, Mr Kayvan Oboudiyat, as CEO.

The Board of Altium wishes to sincerely thank Mr Martin for his tireless dedication to the company for over 25 years and wishes him well for the future as he pursues his personal endeavours.

While Altium has made considerable progress over the past twelve months, having relocated its global headquarters to China, and returning to profitability, it is the Board’s decision that it is in the best interests of Altium to adopt a different style of leadership with focus on returning value to shareholders.

Chairman of Altium, Mr Sam Weiss said, “Nick Martin has been a significant contributor to Altium over many years. Notwithstanding, it is the view of the Board that while Altium’s assets and technological innovation have always been strong, the company has under-performed against the opportunity”.

Altium has positioned itself on a path to transform itself from a traditional software company to a “software as a service company” that embraces the web. This has been achieved through the active pursuit of content driven subscription strategy and the acquisition of the required web-related technologies and their subsequent development direction.

These achievements along with Altium’s relocation to China provide an opportunity for Altium to be a key player in the emerging Electronic Design Tools market that is built around web-enabled devices. The Board has recognised that for this opportunity to be fully realised, Altium must commit to the achievement of profitability that is sustainable over the long-term.

Mr Weiss further stated that “as a Board, we are pleased to be able to appoint Mr Kayvan Oboudiyat as our CEO and achieve a successful and seamless change to leadership. As Executive Vice Chairman, with over 15 years experience with Altium, Kayvan understands the company well”. Altium also intends to undertake a search to identify a suitable external candidate to join the leadership team, and will advise further at the time of any such appointment."

If you found this article to be of interest, visit Programmable Logic Designline where – in addition to my Max's Cool Beans blogs – you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to programmable logic devices of every flavor and size (FPGAs, CPLDs, CSSPs, PSoCs...).

Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for my weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).

Well like all proud parents, I hope his child project Co. matures and makes him proud.
Do you know of "the compensation" for his efforts?
Altium has come a long way and show a vision that could make great impact on how other companies provide tools for electronic assembly design and sustain engineering.
Hope the best for Nick!

Nick made a lot of bad decisions and big mistakes in his time at Altium, such as the insane amount of money paid for Tasking and Situs, the costly move to and subsequent move back from the US, the Morfik fiasco and many others. The whole vision of doing FPGA was doomed from the very start, where even still to this day you're forced to use the 3rd party tools of the FPGA vendors to get decent edif.
The company gave him the freedom to make the decisions that would drive Altium forward instead he went from one costly mistake to the next. He did not properly understand the EDA world and its needs, because simply put, he had never professionally done any form of electronic engineering. It's like trying to write an English 'humor' book when all you know is Mandarin - there will be certain subtleties that you'll never understand until you start speaking English and interacting with English speaking people. Furthermore Nick had surrounded himself with a bunch of yes-men such as Matt Schwaiger, Alan Perkins, Ben Jordan and alike that pretty much agreed mindlessly and congratulated him on every thing he did mistake or otherwise.
Now that's a sure recipe for failure in anyone's book.

That seems odd. If you know any of the "yes-men" you mentioned, you'd know the kind of innovative, intelligent and independent men that they are. Hardly cronies who just nod along to everything Nick says.

I think the recent recovery of the share price and financial performance of the company had nothing at all to do with moving to China per se. It was the immediate financial benefit on this years books of retrenching a large percentage of the company (myself included, being a former employee), and getting those higher paid western staff off the books. And that's even with the multi-million dollar financial baggage of the now abandoned Sydney HQ. So the savings have been quite large indeed.
Most of the people I worked with at Altium (who didn't ultimately want to go to China) are now gone, including much of the programming staff.
And now Nick is gone too, and if people didn't know, Nick was still quite a hands-on developer at the company as well as setting the direction.
I do hope they have enough new talent to make up for it all.
So I think it's way too early to see if moving to China had the strategic benefit it was supposed to. i.e. access to a much larger programming talent pool at lower cost to the company.
From what I've been hearing, it's not as easy to get very good, low cost and loyal programmers in Shanghai.
It is certainly the end of an era, having used Protel from DOS Autotrax 1.6 myself. I wish Nick all the best, and I doubt we've heard the last of him in this space. I expect he'll put his talent toward something new ad interesting pretty quickly.

@EEVblog your comment regarding the stock price rise as a result of the China move and laying off the AU office headquarters is wrong. Altium's stock has always been iliquid (emma lo russo can confirm that). In any case acorrding to IRESS, roubly 80% of ALU executions in the last 12 months have been in intraday off-market crosses. That means two parties got together before hand decided on a price - 70c per stock for a few extra percentages of ownership rights?. This makes sense when considering the voting process that got rid of Nick had to have been done based on ownership percentages. In the past Nick could count on the support of his Bahai investors and co directors like Keyvan or long time Tasmania collegues like Sam to toe the line, but this time he just couldn't muster the numbers. Essentially the board and the company in general demonstrated a lack of confidence in him as a leader and as an individual in general.

One more note, you keep on mentioning the recent share price of 70c, here and on your own blog regarding Nick being booted out. I'd like to direct you to the fact that the total volume traded at those prices as being near to nothing when compared to the volumes traded at the 20-35c price range. This is in fact an EOY oriented stock churning scam and not the result of reduced costs or investor speculation due to the 5c dividend that was payed out this year. Dave you really have to stop talking out of your backdoor.

Well, you seem to know an awful lot.
Care to share your real name?
I will freely admit that I know jack all about finances and how the stock market and trades etc works. I'm an engineer, not a stock broker or financial wizard. All I see is that the a) the share price has gone up since they moved to China, and b) that is almost certainly not due to the actual China move in itself. As Clive made the assumption of in this article. That's what I was commenting on.
And it seems you are of the same opinion?
In fact, you are calling it a scam. Are you saying something illegal is going on here?
Are you also saying that laying off staff had absolutely nothing to do with the recent good financial result of the company?
Please explain it all for us less financially educated folk.

"It was the immediate financial benefit on this years books of retrenching a large percentage of the company (myself included, being a former employee), and getting those higher paid western staff off the books. "
yes by moving to China... you're still pissed about losing your job - admit it!

Ah, no I wasn't, I was actually ecstatic about it. I was close to moving on anyway, I had had enough, and went on to do my blogging gig full time. The timing was perfect for me for several reasons, both personal and financial. I was very thankful they did not chose me to stay on.
All that is public record, including on my radio show the day after I got retrenched.
But thanks for having a wild guess!

@EEVBlog actually about a year or more ago when the China move news broke on EET, you were making comments about how you thought Alitum was going to fail and that you didn't care as it was a good time for you to move on and that you had, in your own words, "screw you money" to do whatever it was you wanted to do. You sounded rather jaded back then, and now with all these comments you're making, you seem extremely extatic. One can't help but wonder if there's a bit of schadenfreude going on in your head.

Ah, no I wasn't, I was actually ecstatic about it. I was close to moving on anyway, I had had enough, and went on to do my blogging gig full time. The timing was perfect for me for several reasons, both personal and financial. I was very thankful they did not chose me to stay on.
All that is public record, including on my radio show the day after I got retrenched.
But thanks for having a wild guess!

Quote:
"yes by moving to China... you're still pissed about losing your job - admit it!"
Ah, no I wasn't, I was actually ecstatic about it. I was close to moving on anyway, I had had enough, and went on to do my blogging gig full time. The timing was perfect for me for several reasons, both personal and financial. I was very thankful they did not chose me to stay on.
All that is public record, including on my radio show the day after I got retrenched.
But thanks for having a wild guess!

Altium - let me start off by sating that their PCB design stuff was very good, but their attempted FPGA abortion (ie: the Frustration Station) along with their tied-in Nanoboards, were an absolute heap of bug ridden rubbish.
Even their engineering staff and support people (when they were all still based back in Australia) couldn't get to work properly themselves. The fact that they sold it as a product and wanted to be paid for support and "bigfixes" shows what a joke the company had become.
Let's not forget that Tony was at the helm when the final decision was made to offshore the operation - so I suppose his Karma finally ran over his Dogma. :)
Don't expect people to feel sorry for someone when they've effectively been ripped off. have a trawl of Altium's "support" forum for a feel of how they treated you once you gave them your money for a license.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.

If their new "focus on returning value to shareholders" makes you feel any better as an engineer and your needs then good luck with that.
This is a bit of end of an era sounding and like Clive I find it a bummer. I've been an independent east coast US customer of Protel to now Altium for 20+ years and now worry about what this next brings - "focus" on investor ROI rather than Nick's focus on providing EE's tools that are affordable goals, yes along with all this obsessive marketeering of the cloud nonsense, makes me think I'll need to be sticking with increasingly aging and less integrated tools in the future. I'm sure then I'll find a "focus on" what I'll do with my own annual $1200 to $1500 maintenance fees saved - I'm sure Altium investors don't need my money for their ROI as much as I need it. How's that for a new focus on ROI Altium-China? ;-)

This is a perfect example how the Chinese 'system' grabs the knowledge of a company. It is to their strategic benefits: Lots and lots of Chinese companies already used PCAD or PROTEL (most illegal) before it went to Altium.
You don't have to believe in 'The Flying Spaghetti Monster' to see how this had happened. I am still a user of PCAD (2006...) and bought a Cadence license for about a year ago. But I cannot leave my good old PCAD for time reasons.... (No time for the learning curve... ) It still does all that I want, including 1500 ball FPGA designs.
And this is EXACTLY what the Chinese have found out: You do not need Cadence nor Mentor to get up to a certain level of engineering. OK, it will totally go wrong when speeds go beyond -say- 3GHz, but up to these speeds I have done it all with PCAD until this day. So, my statement for this fact is: "When I see and can do it, why can't the Chinese do it? "
The conclusion of my argument here is that the Chinese have quite a powerful tool in their hands now. They can do -say- 95% of all PCB designs with it.
And for all those engineers who still use Altium for their developments:
Computing in the cloud is not a wise idea !! If you want your IP to land in China for free, be their guest.... I still don't believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster ;-)

"..it is in the best interests of Altium to adopt a different style of leadership with focus on returning value to shareholders."
Even Jack Welch admitted that focussing on shareholder value was the dumbest idea in the world. I wish Altium a lot of luck, they're sure to need it.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/

I wish they resurect Protel, this was nice and cheap tool. Altium Designer is too big and too expesive for simple PCB design. If customer wants only design PCB, they push him to buy unneeded modules like FPGA design. I would love to buy "Protel 2012" in 30-50% of price of Altium Designer.

Even if not, people never grow out of own bussines. He could just find some market niche for own products. Few months ago my customer wants to buy licence for PCB EDA software, I was looking for something just for "painting" graphic lines and there were no good software on the market. There are only "big" packages like Cadence and DYI scale like Eagle. They could no afford for big packages, also simple/cheaper version does not fulfill requirements. Eagle was good candidate but if they wanted design some simple display for LED clock on 1 layer PCB, the PCB size limitation will not allow this. There are also licenses for few square meters, 15 layers, but their cost/usability ratio is poor. I was working for years on Protel 98, and this obsolete system could be solution for all their problems, but it is obsolete.

I fully agree with you. Those new tools out there are far too big. Not one engineer wants 'management tools' for 'Layout Time' as a 'new option' on his PCB CAD kit. Nor do they want FPGA tools. Heck, I will call Xilinx if I want a proper tool for VHDL, verification and FPGA placement work. Protel and PCAD were perfect for the level of engineering for most people doing serious engineering. I asked PCAD in 2001 for balanced lines for LVDS, but they never made it work right. And look now: All is LVDS and balanced lines, at high speed for sure... THAT IS the problem (yup and I am a bit frustrated here..., sorry for that)

Yes, so would everyone else. But they can't/won't do that, because if the customer had a choice (like they used to many years ago), the vast majority of them would simply chose the basic SCH/PCB tool, and hardly anyone would buy FPGA, embedded, and "cloud" stuff et.al
That results in less income, and the inability to justify spending the $$$ and resources continuing to develop those things. And hence those aspects would become untenable. Bang, there goes your 10+ years of work marketing and betting the company on that stuff.
That's why it was a brilliant move on Altium's part (in a company politics viewpoint) to bundle it all together. If you want basic PCB, you have to buy everything else.
Then Altium can claim "see, everyone's buying into our FPGA/cloud vision, look at our sales numbers!" When in reality of course, most people just use SCH/PCB like they always have.
That was Altium's "turning the world of electronics design upside down" strategy when they made PCB the advanced "optional extra" a few years back.

..having started with tape up pcb, then Pcad for Dos (before Altium got hold of it), Tango, then Protel, then Altium. The Altium FPGA stuff was a POS and it stole resources needed to make the PCB software better. Altium became nothing more than a marketing machine with undeliverable promises..remember Altium 9 to 10 development? They moved to the cloud not because its was good for the customer, but because piracy..somewhat ironic since the country they moved to is a leader in intellectual property theft and software piracy. Altium's fate is sealed in the labs I know about..never to be seen again. The good news is this opens up the opportunity for a really good software firm to offer a solid pcb layout package at a reasonable price with good support..and NO POS FPGA design included. Leave that to the pros at Xilinx and others.

whats_that_smell, I completely agree^2 with your response. Lots of frustration in the EDA world, that is for sure. What a mess they made out of it and how did they dangle lots of engineers on promise-strings.
Let me tell you that I once offered EUR 100,000.- as an investment to a Dutch Salesrep if he could buy off PCAD from Altium (when they just started with that crap I knew right away that was not the way to go) This is not a joke, this was a damned serious proposal. I knew and I know that there is a good market out there for a PCAD alike tool. I see that Eagle now jumps in this huge gap, at least here in Europe. But for me this is all too late. I bought Cadence and I will try to find my way around in this toolchain. Still love PCAD though...

I do so wish CircuitMaker and TraxMaker (what Protel turned into) could be pried from Altium and turned into a $1K package again. I would gladly rip out the autorouter - I always hand-route.
Eagle and other packages (ie KiCad) are toys. They are difficult to use, don't follow the point/click/drag windows methods (which all three OS's support), and are otherwise unusable.
Actually, if Altium were willing to sell it for a reasonable price, Protel could be both a free version at the DIY level (several pages, two-layer, up to 6-inch square boards), reasonable parts. Unlimited for $1K.
I found Altium really powerful for PCB. Never did the FPGA design.

I doubt if Nick will get the rights to his old stuff, and I doublt that the Chinese guys will let anything slip out their hands.
Best is to start from scratch, do what has been asked before - just schematics & PCB - Maybe simulation but ...
Pick one of the tools available (http://www.gpleda.org/) and start improving it, don't strat from scratch and lose time.

Started with mylar tape decades ago, moved to Daisy Systems Boardmaster - initially an expensive disaster but was made to work for 2-layer boards after about a year. Then when I went to a small company we initially used Design Computation's DMEE - DOS based, only 2-layer boards. Moved to Protel 98 for several years - still only 2-layer boards. Bought the Protel 99SE update, but there were a lot of problems. Stuck with Protel 98 until the requirement for multi-layer boards then moved some designs to 99SE.
A couple of years ago I fell for the upgrade offer to Altium 9 and have been basically pleased with it. Bought two subscription renewals so far, but, with this shakeup I have to really question another renewal.
When the developers get replaced it usually takes quite a while before the newbies get up to speed. The management doesn't understand that no matter how much documentation you have, a lot of product knowledge resides in your senior staff. Death by MBA... sad.

The move by the idiots on the board to illegally fire Nick Martin was no doubt the stupidest move anyone has made since the city of Troy decided to open their gates for that super awesome wooden horse.
Did they think he would run back to Australia with his tail between his legs? A man who built a multimillion dollar company from scratch, who has dedicated over 20 years of his life to that company and the people in it.
I'll sit here smiling whilst Nick Martin takes his case to the AGM alongside the other majority shareholders and has the entire board fired.

I already knew about this ;) But thanks for the link.
Maybe they should have read up about the legality of firing someone (without the entire board present..), or about publishing outright lies. You think such smart men would have actually looked at their actions before going ahead, yet here we are.

Im not Nick (he wouldn't hide behind another name :) ), and I'm not a lawyer. I mean really, a lawyer named Muffin_chops?
I did however work at Altium for a long time, and I know pretty much everyone who worked there :) Including a number of employees who are in China currently. So its likely we have indeed met.
Its also not "Mr".

I’ve been connected with Altium/Protel for many years, since
1986.
Over that time Altium have made some nice products and yet
nearly gone broke on a couple of occasions, and for many of the
other years barely broke even.
At times the company had some very good people on board. Yet
due to the CEO having close to ‘no people skills’ either had them
fired or they just left. The company ran on fear, fear of losing
your job should you speak out with views not aligned to the CEO.
The CEO might of had some technical skills but he had no skills as
far as running a company, let alone running a public company.
Year after year, the results disappointed the shareholders and
yet the CEO kept on spending every last cent of whatever his
latest great idea might be. There was almost no effort made to
inform the shareholders over most of the years as to forecasts,
or where the company was headed or about anything. Read the
ASX announcements, they amount to less than a couple of page
per year.
The FPGA side of the product cost hundreds of millions, with no
return on the investment. The company floated at $2 in 1999
and mid last year, 12 years on hit 8 cents. Although the share price
has improved in the last 12 months, this was not driven by the CEO.
Altium still has many capable people, many have been there
since the IPO, and still others before that. If they listen to what
the customers want, and deliver a working solution, there will be
a great future for the Staff, the shareholders and the customers.
So finally, the staff with expertise in their own areas can do their
job and get on with running the company as it should have been.
He was never CEO material, and never should of held the position.

It's been 26 years... maybe it's time to let go of those sour grapes, eh? Honestly, it just sounds like you're trying to justify reasons why you thought you could have done better, nevermind the fact that Protel was never your baby to begin with. It was Nick's.

Upon a small amount of further investigation, it turns out Mr DJam (or Darren M.) is lying :(.
He is (or was?) a shareholder at Altium and has never worked there. He was no doubt financially hurt many years ago when the stocks failed.
All his comments regarding the CEO and attitude at Altium are 100% off base, and I'm assuming come from his anger at that previous financial loss. Its very sad that this was cause such anger towards the company, and cause him to spread lies.

IMO when one of the CEO's houses is worth more than the market capital of the company, then we have a problem.
The company has an obligation to keep the market (shareholders) informed, Altium have the poorest track record on that front.
BTW you are completely wrong about me, I have always had Altiums and its customers interests at the top of my list. I am a customer and I am a shareholder. If you really know who I am, then you would know that, maybe you should do more than a small amount of investigation.
You seem to have a strong interest in a company you no longer work for. Maybe you should declare you interest ?
Feel free to correct me on the lies. I'm all ears.

Darren, I have stated that you’re lying because you have posted a number of “facts” about Altium that are far from correct. You question my interest in the company, yet I don’t see why?
As stated, I worked for Altium. I know a number of the individuals who work there and have worked there for 10+ years. Many of these individuals followed Altium to China. I dislike lying at the best of times, and especially when it is nothing more than bullshit slander, aimed at a company I know and care about, and a individual I respect greatly.
You seem to think that the company is some sort of dictatorship, where Nick ignored everyone, spends money and does whatever he wants.
“the CEO kept on spending every last cent of whatever his latest great idea might be."
I think you’ll find that is very far from the truth, and to be honest if you understood any small part of what running a company entailed, you would understand why that is ridiculous.
Every decision the company makes goes through many stages before even the start of any sort of work commences.
You state that
"The company ran on fear, fear of losing your job should you speak out with views not aligned to the CEO. "
Yet Altium has never and will never be run that way with Nick Martin in charge.
If you had worked at Altium, or even spoken to someone who has worked there, you would know that the work environment is fantastic. Nick is always approachable, even by the "lowest" employee. He also would and has never fired anyone because they “disagreed.”

You go on to make numerous off base statements in regards to the CEO, which sadly just show your personal vendetta, based on I’m assuming, what you read on the internet.
“IMO when one of the CEO's houses is worth more than the market capital of the company, then we have a problem.”
Again, I don’t know who you’re speaking of? As far as I know, Nick Martin doesn’t own a house of any kind, let alone multiples. Unless there is some other hidden CEO at Altium that nobody else knows about?
I would love to know where you get such inaccurate information :)?

So there is no misunderstanding.
I do speak to Altium staff and management over many years, 20+, including the CEO on the odd occasion, though his replies have been close to useless and that’s when he bothers to reply. I speak to those in China and as recent as last week. As a shareholder, with a little under 1%, I will get to vote my wishes as will anyone else who is a shareholder (part owner) of the company. If you own shares then you can vote too.
I’m also in contact with many shareholders and we all have a good understanding of what is going on.
If I’m so far off base, then why has the board unanimously said they will vote for his removal. The very people that have worked alongside him for many years, some going back to the eighties.

The thing that's missing here is that it's easy turn over leadership in any company and go on saying "this guy stinks, this is wrong, that's wrong, blah, blah" but that is all hindsight. The benefits of which are pretty clear. It's not the next 6 months that'll determine Altium's future but the next 1-3 years, after the ideas run out and someone has to dream up new ones. That's what failed apple after Jobs got sacked and they ended up hiring him back just as soon as they realised it. Now I'm not saying it can't be done but I don't see any engineers on the board of the company. Mr Martin was an engineer and a visionary byt he looks of things. Sure they had some whacky ideas over the years but most were pretty good. Weve used it and like what parts we use and ignore the parts we dont. I never used there FPGA tools when they came out but wouldn't do without them today. Same for 3D. My big hope is that Altium doesn't go the way of Apple when Jobs got the boot. Sure they listened to customers and made shareholders happy but the products were crap. When iMac came out after Jobs was back, it took them almost 20 years to get their feet back. I'm not sure Altium can survive something like that.